Oracle Blog

Thoughts and observations about the Start Up community

DIY: Home NAS Box

"OpenSolaris and ZFS make it possible to build a NAS box with general PC hardware and free open source software, which is different from other NAS boxes in a way that data redundancy is achieved without RAID hardware, and at a very acceptable cost."

"Some principles were established first:

Use low-power 64-bit microprocessor to run Solaris and ZFS smooth and fast;

Use four hot-swappable 3.5" SATA HDD to build a RAIDZ1 pool with over 2TB capacity;

Use Gigabit Ethernet interface to take advantage of the network bandwidth.

Other factors needs to be considered include total cost, total power consumption and noise level. After all, this is for personal and home use.